Brown's Search For Self / Shows emphasize her art as a mirror

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, September 26, 1998

There is no denying the late Joan Brown a significant place in the history of West Coast art as long as her memory lives among admiring colleagues and students.

But to exaggerate her importance -- as does the two-museum retrospective that opens today -- is a disservice, as suggested by the fact that no taker for the show was found outside the Bay Area.

The Oakland Museum of California and the Berkeley Art Museum have collaborated on the definitive overview of Brown's art, backed up with a luxurious catalog produced by the University of California Press. "Transformation: The Art of Joan Brown" runs concurrently at the two museums, which are offering discount tickets to visitors who want to see it at both venues.

The two-museum survey is divided thematically -- "The Self" in Oakland, "The World" in Berkeley -- but the division is more misleading than clarifying.

As show curators Jacquelynn Baas and Karen Tsujimoto acknowledge, Brown's art is always about herself, whatever its subject may appear to be. Artists are frequently accused and guilty of self-absorption. In Brown's case at least, it was a spur, not an impediment, to productivity.

LATEST SFGATE VIDEOS

More important, the thematic bisection of the show distracts from the distinction that needs to be made between what Brown (1938-1990) represented and what she accomplished as an artist.

In the late '50s and early '60s, she personified the smart woman's drive for self-definition in a cultural field dominated by men, frequently men with machismo problems. On the Northern California scene, she was a counterpart to somewhat older East Coast contemporaries such as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, who personalized abstract expressionism.

The child of an alcoholic father and a suicidally depressed mother in San Francisco, Brown was determined not to sink into her parents' defeated mode of life. The need to propel herself beyond her onerous childhood seems to have condemned her to overestimate the value of self- expression in art.

The current show presents her as having spent almost no time on abstract painting. Even early on, when she borrowed abstract expressionism's heavy pigment and emphatic gestures, she used them to make homey, almost whimsical pictures such as "Refrigerator Painting" (1964) in Berkeley and "Noel in the Kitchen" (c. 1964) in Oakland.

Later, when she thinned out and brightened her paint (and switched from oil to enamel), Brown tried one autobiographical voice after another, like a dazed ventriloquist, rarely hitting on one that rang true.

VERVE OF GESTURE

The painter as mother appears in pictures such as "Christmas Time 1970 (Joan & Noel)" (1970) in Oakland. The picture is notable for the fallen leaves that clutter its background: They are painted with a verve of gesture and color we rarely find in Brown's work after she began to flatten out her pictures and make them openly self-advertising.

In pieces such as "The Mermaid" (1970) and "Woman Wearing Mask" (1972), Brown literally tried on masks, as if painting were the only mirror in which she hoped to recognize herself. But "Self-Portrait" (1970) seems to be one of her truest self-images: a vacant, straightforward likeness with a spray of symbols around it.

None of Brown's pictures of herself with real or phantom men has the emotional conviction of the nearly abstract "Two Cypress Trees" (1980). Its style and color echo the work of her third husband and fellow painter Gordon Cook, although they were divorced by then. With its two cropped cypresses rising parallel against a flat lavender sky, the painting seems to dismiss all hope of art bridging gulfs between individuals.

Some of Brown's most effective autobiographical paintings make reference to her childhood.

The best example is "Portrait of a Girl" (1971) in Oakland, an image of herself at perhaps 7 or 8, standing wide-eyed and alone on a polished floor before a red wall blazoned with Chinese characters and a gleefully menacing dragon.

The floor reflects her Mary Janes, which resemble little gas masks, as if she were on tiptoe with anxiety. The ideograms seem to stand for the adult world's incomprehensibility, while the dragon evokes both a childlike terror of life and an adult dread of unconscious compulsion.

The work of other perilously self- involved painters such as R.B. Kitaj and the mature Philip Guston is fascinating as long as their introversion is borne on the painting process itself, which allows unconscious energies an outlet.

It seems as if Brown came to want the wrong kind of control, wrong for her art anyway, even if right for herself. With rare exceptions, such as "Nanda Devi No. 2" (1979), she gradually let her work's content and conscious design stifle the energy of painting in it.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

A few things in the retrospective hint at the road Brown did not take but perhaps should have.

A very early picture in Oakland called "Marching to the Battle" (1959) is far more absorbing in its formal ambiguity and psychological presence than any of her self-portraits. But that kind of ambiguity seems either to have spooked or her or failed to interest her.

She chose the waking dreams of introspection and posing over the dreaming of the hand that we see in "Marching to the Battle" and a few other early works. What a loss to contemporary painting.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.